We crossed the lobby.
“The elevator doesn’t work yet,” Barabas informed me. “The bottom floors aren’t finished. Only the top three are.”
“That’s fine. We’ll take the stairs,” Curran said.
We climbed the steps. I knew stairs would be the death of me one day.
Twelve floors went by fast. I opened the door and we stepped into a wide hallway lined with green carpet. Six journeymen stood on the left, six vampires sitting by their feet. Across from them Derek and five of our combat-grade people stood on the right. Derek saw us and pushed himself from the wall.
If I knew anything at all about Derek, this wasn’t the totality of the Pack’s forces in the building. They would have people stashed on the roof, on the floor below, in the parking lot.
“No need for everyone to die,” I murmured.
Curran nodded at Derek. “Clear the building. Take our people out.”
He didn’t even blink. “Yes, Lord.”
“Everyone, Derek,” I added. “A complete recall.”
“Yes, Consort.” He turned to the shapeshifters. “Full evac.”
They turned and took off toward the stairs. He followed them, his voice raised, talking to people with supernatural hearing above and below us. “Full evac. I repeat, full evac. Clear the building.”
The journeymen looked at each other. One of them, a young girl with red hair, barely a woman, ran toward the door at the far end of the hallway. Curran and I followed. We weren’t in a hurry. We wanted to give our people enough time to leave Lakeside.
The hallway ended. Curran pushed the door open and walked into the room. A hundred feet long and about half as wide, the room housed two long tables, one at the left wall and the other at the right, each covered with a tablecloth, the floor between them empty. The alphas of the Pack Council sat on the right. The People sat on the left. I saw familiar faces, Mahon and Martha, Raphael, Desandra . . . Everyone was here.
We took our seats. I reached under the table and squeezed Curran’s hand. He squeezed back.
“We’re about to be attacked,” Curran said.
“We know,” Mahon said.
Across the room, the seven Masters of the Dead gaped at me, each holding two vampires arranged in a precise line against the wall behind them. Six familiar faces, and one new, an older man with gray hair. The red-headed journeyman was whispering to Ghastek. He glared at us and waved her off. “I don’t care who Lennart pulled out of the building.”
The gray-haired man rose, walked over, and knelt on the floor directly across from me. Oops. Looks like I sat down too soon.
“Sharrim.”
I’d heard his voice before. When we tried to escape Hugh’s burning castle, before Aunt B died, Hugh had sent vampires after me. I had slaughtered the undead, ruining the minds of the navigators who had piloted them, but I left one alive. When that vampire had spoken to me, it spoke in this man’s voice.
The People stared at us. Rowena was blinking rapidly, stunned. Ghastek leaned forward, focused on me with a laser’s precision. I wondered what Landon had told him. Maybe nothing. Wouldn’t that be funny?
“Sharrim,” the man repeated.
Showtime. I got up and walked over to him. He looked up at me, his hands folded on his lap.
“You are young,” the Master of the Dead said. “You have the power, but lack control. Think of all the things he could teach you. Think of the secrets that would open to you.”
I felt a power gathering beyond the walls of Lakeside, like a distant storm flashing with lightning on the horizon. The windows didn’t permit me a view of the sky, but I bet it churned with storm clouds. My father was coming.
“Think of what you could become.”
Oh, I was thinking about it. I did nothing but think about it the whole time it took me to get from Jester Park to Atlanta.
The arcane storm drew closer, terrible, swirling with power currents.
There were twenty-two vampires in the immediate vicinity. Six in the hallway, twelve in the room, and four in the adjacent room.
It would have to be enough. There was one power I didn’t demonstrate to my father. It was about time.
“There is no need to fight a battle that can’t be won.”
The storm swelled just outside the building, about to break on us.
“Think of who you are.”
The hurricane of magic burst. Lightning flashed outside the narrow windows and smashed into the wall in front of me. The stone cracked. I grabbed the vampires and pulled them to me. The navigators’ minds kicked and bucked like runaway horses. Rowena cried out. The Masters of the Dead pulled back, struggling to keep control.
I opened my mouth. “Hesaad.” Mine.
The power word tore from me, cracking like a whip. The navigators’ resistance vanished. The Master of the Dead in front of me got to his feet and pressed himself flat against the left wall. The vampires streamed to me.
The wall in front of me split open. Chunks of stone moved back, away from me, held apart, hung in the air for a long moment, and plunged down. The sky was black and gray with the full fury of a storm, and below the clouds, the sunset bled onto the sky. Icy wind bathed me, tugged my hair.
The mass of vampires circled me, forming an undead maelstrom around my feet.
Golden light burst into the space where the wall had been. Tendrils of pale smoke rose from it. The wall of light shimmered with yellow and white as if someone had ripped away a chunk of the sun’s corona and thrust it into Lakeside. My father’s face filled it, enormous, his eyes blazing with power.
His voice shook the tower. “DAUGHTER.”
I looked into the power roaring into my face. “Father.”
“Father?” someone squeaked to the left. Ghastek might have just had a heart attack.
Power reverberated through Lakeside, shaking the stone. “COME TO ME. STAND BY MY SIDE.”
The light and flame surged forth and I saw myself wearing crimson armor. A golden crown rested on my head. I looked like my grandmother.
I pushed with my power and the vampiric heads surrounding me exploded. Undead blood flooded the floor. I raised my left arm and sliced across it with Sarrat. My blood streamed down, mixing with the dark ruby liquid by my feet. My magic shot through the undead blood like fire down a detonation cord. The undead blood streamed to me, pliant and obedient. It curved around my feet, coating my clothes, slid over my arms, and drained down Sarrat, widening the blade as it coated the saber in crimson.
“TAKE YOUR PLACE.”
“No.”
The blood armor surged up, sheathing my body. The image of me wearing a crown burst and shattered.
I raised my head. “This is my city. Get out.”
The coronal fire in front of me swelled. A spear shot out, colossal, forged of golden light and power, aiming at me. The claiming.
I lunged, swinging my new blood sword. Sarrat connected with the spear.
Magic revolted, bursting and screaming around me. The impact nearly took me off my feet. It was like playing tug-of-war with a tornado. The blade shook and shuddered in my hands.
The spear of power pushed. The enormity of my father’s magic pressed on me, crushing me, grinding my bones into dust. Pain started from the tips of my fingers and washed down over me. I burned. From the top of my head to the soles of my feet, I burned. My eyes couldn’t see any damage, but my senses screamed that my skin was bubbling from the heat.
If I gave up now, Roland would claim Atlanta. I couldn’t let that happen. He would not take this city. People I knew, people I loved, wouldn’t bow and kneel to him as long as I stood.
“Amehe,” I whispered to my blade. “Amehe. Amehe.” Obey. Obey. Obey.
My bones cried out. In my head my muscles began to unravel, fiber by fiber, frayed nerves shaking in the raging wind. But I would not move.
I would not move.
“This is my city. These are my people.”
I tasted the sharp bite of my
magic on my lips. My nose was bleeding. Tiny red drops rose from my cheeks and floated to join the blood coating Sarrat. My eyes were bleeding, too.
My arms shook. My feet slid back half an inch. Another half an inch.
A muscular arm wrapped around my stomach. Another closed over my chest. A deafening lion roar, proud and furious, thundered over my shoulders. Curran braced me. His magic mixed with mine.
My feet stopped moving.
My father pushed and we pushed back.
Thin, painfully bright cracks appeared in the spear where it met my blade.
The strain was ripping my body apart. I poured even more of my magic into the force of my strike. I thought I had given it all I could, but it kept coming and coming, fountaining from inside me.
The cracks widened.
Just a little more . . .
The spear shattered.
I tried to pull back, but I couldn’t. The magic continued to rush out of me, as unstoppable as a flood, more, more, more . . . I struggled to contain it, but it refused to stop. It ripped me out of Curran’s arms and jerked me off my feet into the air. My blood armor crumbled into dust. Words appeared on my hands and arms, strange words written in dark ink. The air around me turned red. The ceiling above me exploded. My body bent back, my arms opened wide, my back arched. The building swayed, shaking. Below me, people crouched by the walls, trying to hide from my power.
The magic inside me erupted. My voice rolled like the sound of an enormous bell.
“HESAAD.” MINE.
A pulse of pure red shot out of me, spreading in a ring over Atlanta. The blast wave rolled with a sound like thunder. I felt it slide over the city all the way past the outskirts, past the Keep until finally it dissipated. The magic soaked into the ground and it responded, sending a surge of magic back to me.
Oh no.
I had claimed the city. I had marked Atlanta as my dominion.
My father smiled and disappeared.
I plunged down and landed on the hard floor in front of Curran, still in his warrior form. The two of us looked at each other. Chunks of something that probably used to be the roof rained down around us.
Curran unhinged his monstrous jaws. I braced myself.
“Show-off.”
I just stared at him. My brain couldn’t string any words together.
He grinned at me. “Come on, baby. We’re going home.”
• • •
WALKING DOWN TO the bottom floor of Lakeside and then to the Pack Jeep was a lot harder than anticipated. Someone had already started the enchanted water engine for us. I got in on the passenger side. I was so numb. I just kept moving forward on autopilot. I should’ve felt something. Relief, fear, some sort of human emotion, but there was nothing there. Only cold detachment.
Curran pulled a spare set of sweats from the back of the Jeep Wrangler, shifted into human form, put them on, and slid into the driver’s seat. He shifted the Jeep out of park and steered it onto the street. A caravan of Pack Jeeps joined us.
The storm clouds had long since dissipated. The sunset had burned itself out, leaving a mere smudge of red in the sky, a distant memory of its dying. The sky above us turned a deep purple.
My mouth finally moved. “Don’t.”
Curran looked at me.
“Don’t take me back to the Keep. They’ll want an explanation. I can’t do it right now.”
Curran made a sharp right turn into a snowed-in lot between an office building and a ruin. The car screeched to a stop.
Behind us the caravan of vehicles stopped. The leading vehicle’s door opened and Jim trotted out and to our car. Curran rolled down the window, letting the earsplitting noise of the enchanted water engine into the vehicle.
“What’s the problem?” Jim yelled over the noise of the motor.
“No problem,” Curran yelled back. “Go ahead without us.”
“What?”
“Go ahead without us!”
“Why?”
“Because I want to spend some time with my wife in peace!” Curran roared.
Jim nodded, gave us a thumbs-up, and went back to his Jeep.
Curran rolled the window up. “It’s like living in a fucking fishbowl.”
The Pack vehicles passed us. Curran turned the Jeep and drove in the opposite direction, southwest.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
The city slid by the window, the dark silhouettes of buildings, some crumbling, some sturdy and new, highlighted by the blue glow of feylanterns. It was my city now. Truly mine. I’d claimed it and now I was responsible for it.
“I claimed the city,” I told Curran.
“Would you like me to build you an office?”
What? I stared at him.
“You could have a little plaque with your name on it. Kate Daniels, City Owner.”
“It’s not funny.”
“We can get you one of those bank line setups with stanchions and velvet rope and a little pillow in the front, so people can form a line and kneel before you in humble supplication . . .”
“Will you stop?”
“We can get Derek one of those dark suits and aviator shades. He can look menacing and give out numbers. ‘You are seventh in line to bow before Kate Daniels.’”
“I’m going to punch you in the arm,” I growled.
“We can get you a throne with snakes. I’ll stand next to you and roar at anybody who fails to grovel. Fear Kate Daniels. She is a mighty and terrible ruler. Grendel can anoint the petitioners with his vomit. It’ll be great . . .”
Oh God. I put my hands over my face.
“Come on, baby,” he said. “I’m just trying to cheer you up.”
“I claimed territory that my father wanted. He’ll lose his shit completely now. Not only that, but every ambitious idiot with a drop of magical power will know that this area is claimed and will look for whoever claimed it. Not to mention that right now the Witch Oracle, the neo-pagans, and the People are all having a fit of apoplexy. I was supposed to prevent the claiming, not take the city. The Pack Council will be having kittens.”
“The Witch Oracle and the neo-pagans can bite me,” Curran said. “They’ll get over it. If anybody comes to challenge you, we’ll kick their ass. We’ll find a way to handle Roland. And if the Pack Council produces any kittens, we’ll give them to Jim to raise. He needs to mellow out anyway.”
I looked at him.
He took his hands off the wheel and held them apart about six inches. “Cute fluffy kittens. Just sitting on Jim’s lap.”
I pictured Jim with his badass-chief-of-security expression covered in small fluffy kittens. It was too much. The numbness inside me broke, like a dam. I giggled and laughed. Curran laughed, too.
“Cute kittens, meow-meow,” I managed. In my head, Jim held up his finger and sternly lectured a pack of kittens. Oh God. “He’d make them all hard-core.”
“He’d take them to the Wood to hunt deer,” Curran said between the bouts of laughter. “They’d . . . pounce.”
I would’ve doubled over if the seat belt had let me.
We were still laughing like two idiots when he pulled into a parking lot before a dark apartment building. The place looked familiar. Oh. This was my old apartment building. I had inherited an apartment from my guardian, Greg Feldman, and made it my own during the time I worked for the Order. But my aunt had gutted it. The last time I saw the place, it was completely destroyed.
“There’s nothing there,” I told him.
“Let’s go see anyway,” he said.
Why not?
I got out of the car. Surprisingly my legs held me. We went up the stairs together. A new door barred the access to my apartment. A mechanical combination door lock secured the door. A column of numbers, one through five, each with a button by it, waited above the lock.
“Four, four, one, two, three,” Curran said.
I pressed the buttons in order. The lock clicked. I swung the door op
en.
A clean, furnished apartment looked back at me. The floor in the hallway was wood. I could see a little bit of the kitchen through the doorway, backlit by feylanterns. New oak cabinets had replaced the broken wrecks of the old ones. I stepped inside. On the left, the living room, which I had used as a bedroom, stood perfectly intact. The walls had been repaired and painted in soothing blue-green. A queen-sized bed with a dark, soft comforter stood against the wall. Another feylantern hung above it. A plush beige rug lay on the floor. Across the room, by the window, a flat TV set was mounted on the wall, next to bookcases filled with books. Gray curtains matching the comforter framed the window. Outside the glass windows, steel and silver bars glowed weakly, reacting with magic and the light of the rising moon.
I moved through the living room and glanced into the small room that Greg had used as his bedroom and I had turned into a library. Bookcases lined the walls, waiting for books to be put in them.
“I know it’s not an exact duplicate,” Curran said, turning the valve on the radiator. He’d had a radiator installed. Wow. The super must’ve finally caved and fixed the damn boiler. “But I thought you might want to come back here one day.”
It wasn’t an exact duplicate. It looked like a brand-new apartment and that was so much better. Too many memories had been tied to the old one.
Curran strode through the room, coming closer. He moved with a kind of smooth contained power. His gray eyes focused on me. He looked at me as if I wore nothing.
We were alone. In an apartment. The door was locked.
I unbuckled the belt that kept Sarrat’s sheath on my back, slipped out of it, and put it on the night table.
He closed the distance between us. His arms closed around me, one across my back, the other pressing in on the curve just above my butt. He pulled me to him. My breasts brushed against his muscular chest, my legs bumped against his hard thighs, and the rigid length of him pressed against my stomach. I was caught in his arms. He had collected me and trapped me. His body caged me. I could barely move.
My survival instinct kicked in, screaming at me to escape. My eyes widened. My breath quickened, each rise of my chest pushing my nipples against him. My body tightened, as if before a fight, the muscles gathering themselves in anticipation. I breathed in his scent, familiar and tempting. It said Curran. Male. Sex. Lust flared inside me like a well-laid-out fire.